Melbourne Will Size Up Tree Ordinance Again At Tonight's Meeting

April 8, 1986|By David Scruggs of The Sentinel Staff

MELBOURNE — It will take a lot more than a chainsaw to cut down a tree in Melbourne if the city council adopts a revised landscaping ordinance tonight. Tree cutters will need a $15 permit and a good reason.

Proposed revisions, which the council adopted March 25, have exempted some species of trees from the ordinance. The revisions also decreased the minimum trunk size of protected trees from 6 to 4 inches in diameter and increased the number of trees required on newly developed lots.

The proposed ordinance has received no opposition.

Landscaping standards developed in the early 1970s only specified the number of trees a lot should have and required additional planting if there was an insufficient number to begin with. Permitting and enforcement never were made formal.

Council member Bobby Bechtel said, ''We've more or less said that you were supposed to save the ones that were over 6 feet tall, but we have never really put that much into permitting. We never put teeth into it. It was there, but that aspect of it was never enforced as much as planting trees at the end of construction. It wasn't a very effective ordinance.''

Now to get a certificate of occupancy, which is required before a newly constructed building can be used, the development would have to have a predetermined number of trees. To chop a tree down during construction on more than one acre, an application has to be completed, a fee paid for each tree to be removed and a detailed site plan submitted for approval.

For new commercial, professional and apartment developments, there has to be shrubbery or a fence along the property line and there has to be at least one tree every 50 feet along the property line. For land along public rights of way, there has to be a hedge row or fence surrounding the property, and there has to be one tree every 30 feet along the perimeter.

Parking lots have to have landscaped islands, each with a tree and shrubbery or something else green. On single- or two-family lots, there have to be at least four trees and all of the land has to be sodded.

Violators, according to the ordinance, will be penalized, but no specific fines have been set.